Page 120 of The Salt King

Just like the coins were landing on heads. Failure of randomness. Hence the banks.

If randomness didn’t decide how coins and dice fell, or how lightning struck, or the thousand other things it usually determined . . . what did decide, now?

She couldn’t think. Half her mind was still staring back at the thing on Sally’s balcony.

Nothing had followed, even though the part of her trained on films expected an unearthly shriek and a fasting-moving horde. The only things moving were people, shadows, and stray cats. Nothing was climbing the gutters or the telegraph poles; nothing crawled from the corners.

She let her breath out in intervals, a third, two thirds, all the way.

“Typical,” said Sally. “The apocalypse happens, and half of Amman sets up a market stall. You can’t say people aren’t practical.” He sounded incredulous and halfway to proud at the same time. “Existential panic? No, ma’am, just buy one get one free.”

Because she had been thinking about dice and the dead, Tallis hadn’t seen that on the narrow way ahead of them, there were at least a dozen brightly coloured market stalls, all hung about with lamps, the kind with rainbow glass and intricate metalwork. Hand-painted signs hung above them, sometimes banners, sometimes written on paper lanterns. She couldn’t read any.

“Fortune-telling,” Sally said, pointing at one. “Coffee reading. Your Fate in the Poetry of Fal-e Hafez. The Science of the Sand.” He looked confused. “They’re . . . all like that.”

As Tallis watched, someone scattered a handful of sand over a bronze tray, and three girls leaned close to see. There were some exclamations she didn’t understand, and she couldn’t see the sand past them, but it was doing something unexpected.

“All of that needs some element of randomness, doesn’t it,” she said, more to the world generally than to Sally. “Coffee reading is like reading tea leaves. The poetry thing is a random selection of lines. Sand reading is about—random lines and dots.” She stared at the middle distance. There was something in that. “I Ching is sticks thrown at random. Tarot cards have to be shuffled; random.”

“Sorry?” said Sally, distracted, because somebody had just stepped out in front of him, smiling, to show him a glass cup full of old coffee grounds. “No, thank you . . .”

Tallis looked into the cup.

It showed figures like the one in the dosimetry image. Something like people, but attached to a chaos of wheels and eyes, eagle wings, lion faces, whipping tails, and fabric.

When she brushed his arm, Sally looked too, and she saw his expression open from impatience to helpless perplexity.

Some quality of that image, though, felt like the memory of seeing much more than seeing. Just like the figures in the graveyard. Every instinct Tallis had trained to recognise a hallucination was shouting that although, yes, the coffee grounds were really forming shapes . . . it wasn’t real. The image was like a hallucination that had made its way into coffee.

“You should get out of here,” Sally said to the fortune teller. “There are—back there, people are coming out of graves.”

“God be praised,” the fortune teller said primly, nodding to the red moon.

As they passed away from the residential streets, the almost cosy feel of the night changed, and hardened. The fires were soon in the middle of the road. Abandoned cars stood askew everywhere. An ambulance with its doors ominously slung open. Shadowy figures ran at the edges of the way. Sometimes distant, sometimes right in front of them, windows smashed. Tallis had always imagined looting was done by angry young men, but the person holding the baseball bat now was a scared-looking girl with a baby strapped to her chest.

When they passed a group of men in some kind of uniform, Sally caught her hand and gripped it, but the men ignored them. They seemed intent on going elsewhere.

Tallis had to crush down a panic that was opening its rows and rows of gun ports, ready to fire chain shot right into the part of her mind that was clinging hard to common sense and clarity. It would have been disconcerting enough to see the world crumble in a part of it she knew well, where she understood every word and knew its codes of dress and manners, but here: she only understood one phrase in ten, and she couldn’t read people’s clothes or accents, or even all the road signs, or any of the other thousand tiny things you could know only if you belonged. Everyone was being shipwrecked now, but she was much further out to sea than most.

It was all right. She had Sally. She had Sally.

From a minaret a long way off, the call to prayer echoed eerie through the night. Sensible, Tallis thought. Get people off the streets and inside, and tell them what to do, even if it was just making sandwiches or something, and all this would go a lot better. She wondered suddenly what was happening at home. Were the church bells ringing? Had the banks failed there too, or was it localised? When she made it back, would the windows in her flat be smashed in, because someone desperate had wanted to raid her kitchen for canned food?

In the middle of the road was a person on fire.

Flames covered them wholly, but they seemed not to feel it. They were just standing still, head tilted, watching. The proportions weren’t right. The arms were too long, the knees too low, and . . . she couldn’t tell in the smoke that poured from them, but there was something wrong with the face.

Another figure burned out of the shadows, crawling, trailing embers.

Sally gripped her arm. “Turn around. We need to go back.”

Tallis didn’t move.

Failure of randomness in salt light. Instead you got . . . what? Coins always landing on heads, dice on six, coffee grounds and sand making shapes . . .

In a deep-down way she couldn’t trace yet, she was certain that that was the same as the red moon, the dead rising, and jinn burning in the street. All of it was too . . . too something.

One of the burning figures began to walk towards them. Like she had at the hospital, she felt as if she were watching it on a screen. This wasn’t her country, and these weren’t her jinn.